AP File Photo via Inquirer.com
WLP’s Carol Tracy and Tara Murtha wrote a piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer in anticipation of tonight’s discussion “Should Roe Be Overturned?” event at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
Specifically, we’ve been thinking a lot about the significance of the anti-choice movement’s shift from feigning concern for patient safety while passing state-level abortion restrictions to unabashedly calling to overturn Roe, which would endanger every single patient who couldn’t afford to travel to a state where abortion was legal.
From the piece:
If Roe is overturned, some states will recriminalize abortion. That means those states will no longer regulate abortion. That means the anti-choice movement just spent years building an elaborate matrix of overlapping sets of strict regulations — Pennsylvania alone has at least 1,237 pages of law, statutes, and regulations governing abortion care — just to concede they don’t want regulation after all. The goal isn’t protection, it’s arrest.
Forty-six years after Roe, we have sophisticated global public health data that underscores the fact that criminalizing abortion doesn’t end abortion, it only ends safe, legal abortion for people who can’t afford travel to where it is legal. Currently, approximately 68,000 women die of unsafe abortion annually, making it one of the leading causes of global maternal mortality (13%).
If Roe is overturned, some people will successfully manage their own abortion with pills obtained through the mail or, like before Roe, by finding a doctor who honors the Hippocratic Oath despite the law. Others will not be so lucky. Every single person who can’t afford to travel to a state with legal abortion will be forced to take that risk.
Of course, wealthy and well-connected people will always be able to secure a legal safe abortion for themselves or their partners. Just ask former U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy, a “pro-life” champion who resigned after an extramarital girlfriend alleged he urged her to have an abortion.
Murphy was rightfully called a hypocrite, but the reality is that his behavior reflects the goal of the movement that once championed him.
Read the rest of the article here.
The Women’s Law Project is a public interest law center devoted to defending and expanding the rights of women, girls, and LGBTQ people in Pennsylvania and beyond.
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